Feminism and Sex-Extinction

by Arabella Kenealy

On the other hand, the finer and more exquisite womanly qualities and aptitudes, the emotions and devotions; purity, sweetness, patience, forbearance, tenderness, lovingness and lovableness, together with the courtesies and graces, have fallen out of culture and are fast declining toward extinction. And this, in the measure of the mushroom-growth of masculine abilities and aims and bent, now substituted for them in the sex. With which decline of womanly characteristics, the religion and nobility, virility and chivalry, manly reverence and regard for women, wherewith the true mother illumines the souls of her sons, and which are man's response to the appeal of true woman, are waning rapidly also.

There is, in all men worth the name, an instinctive recognition that the world's most strenuous labours and the world's administration are their natural functions, and that upon their sex, accordingly, rests the responsibility alike of progress or decline in these directions.

This sense of responsibility is both stimulating and uplifting, in the degrees of its realisation and fulfilment. The yielding, by man, to the other sex, of masculine essential rights and obligations is, at the same time, a symptom in him of declining virility, physical and mental, and a cause inevitable of his further speedy decadence. The position yielded, and equality in all things ceded to woman, that pride in his sex, in himself, and in his work, which were his strongest incentives to progress, drop to ever lower grades. Until he comes at last to the state of the decadent savage, who keeps as many wives to work for him as their work for him enables him to keep.

The spirit and pride of Sex are normal and inspiring, and are the expression of that impulse which has directed, in both sexes, the contrary trend of both. No man of mettle feels ever again the same zest or spur to achievement in a rôle that has become equally woman's. Arrogance? Possibly. But wholesome and energising. Defect of that pride in his man's mission which inspired Drake, Columbus, Nelson, Cæsar, Shakespeare, Newton, to great conquest. Without it, man ceases to be man. That it is a factor to be reckoned with, was proved by the recent election, which was signalised by being woman's first authorised entry into the political arena—and was characterised by nothing so much as by man's indifference, even his neglect to record his vote. And that it is a factor to be reckoned with, is further and seriously proved by the slackness and diminished zest and output of masculine Labour, since the other sex has invaded the field.

Woman, for her part, is characterised by a similar spirit and pride of her sex. Equally she loses it when men intrude upon her province. And this Sex-pride and spirit in her would be nobly intensified and uplifted to ever higher levels of expression and attainment, were she but assured of the fine quality and issues of those woman-faculties and functions, by way of which it is her privilege first to create Life, and afterwards to minister to it.

A potent factor in man's impotence to hold his own either in moral or achievement, when pitted directly against the other sex, is that power many women exercise of recruiting their vital forces from those of persons—and of men, particularly—in association with them. The highest levels of work and inspiration are the product of reserve and surplus forces. When these are depleted, only languid and lower-grade aims and capacities are possible.

The extent to which over-worked women may impair the health and constitutional vigour of men associated with them in work was strikingly shown during the changed conditions of War. Surrounded by over-wrought girls and women, who kept themselves going by stimulus of nervous excitement, of strong tea or more dangerous drugs, many men, co-workers or heads of departments, became neurasthenic wrecks. Others lapsed to the condition of infirm old men. The like was seen in fathers and husbands of such over-wrought War-workers. And nervous depletion occasioned by working-wives has doubtless much to do with the inanition and depression now crippling our industrial output.

I may be charged with holding a brief for the Enemy-sex. If so, it is not only because man's cause is woman's, but, moreover, because his present disposition to surrender his prerogatives all round shows him dangerously blind to the truth of woman's power; misdirection whereof from its natural channels menaces not only him, but woman herself, and the Race. Find the woman! said the French cynic. Jestingly: because he no more than other men had gauged the profundity of the saying, in all its deep and vast biological phenomena and implications.

Our national survival stands in jeopardy already, indeed, from the lower-grade males—narrow-brained neurotics or feeble-brained neurasthenics—whom latter-day women are producing yearly in tens of thousands. And the deplorable truth of this degeneracy is overlooked, because no more than a fractional number of our doctors distinguish between The Normal and The Average. With the result, that comparing an abnormal with others more abnormal, they declare the less abnormal satisfactory. Of the fine physique, the vital health and faculty, the zest and joy of living which characterise true Normality—and which are the birthright of every human being—only the few have any conception.

It is significant that the sole ancient civilisations now surviving, India and China, have never hazarded their chances of survival by emancipating their women. On the other hand, because their women are in bondage, personally and psychologically, and because their women's vital powers are exhausted by laborious and de-sexing occupations, the moral and material progress of these peoples is at low ebb.